DOCSLIB.ORG

A Journalist's Lifelong Search for Truth

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Journalist's Lifelong Search for Truth “A Journalist’s Lifelong Search for Truth” By Julie Mack Thanks so much for having me today. What I want to talk about today what I’ve learned about truth over my 40-some-year career as a journalist. Truth is a very big deal for most journalists and that’s certainly true for me. That search for truth is what hooked me on journalism, and the specific event was the Watergate scandal. I was 13 when that scandal started and I read everything I could about it. Of course, I was especially fascinated me was the story of how these two young reporters – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – were able to help uncover the truth that Nixon and his minions were trying to cover up. So I started in journalist enthralled by these very idealist notions of searching for truth. And at that point, I saw truth in pretty simplistic terms – there was right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies. Over the years, I had to come to grips with some hard lessons about truth. That’s truth is often complicated. It can be a matter of perspective. It can be elusive. It can be painful. And truth doesn’t always win; sometimes, the facts just don’t carry the day. So here are the lessons I’ve learned about truth. Lesson No. 1: Sometimes we simply don’t know the truth and we never will. Truth is often murky As a reporter, you learn this quickly – so many stories are he said vs. she said; someone makes an accusation and the alleged perp denies it. Maybe it was a racist comment from a store clerk, an inappropriate remark by a teacher, an accusation of sexual harassment or assault. How could we confirm for sure what happened? It’s actually easier today, thanks to the ubiquitousness of emails and texts, video and audio recordings. Think of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and all the other police-involved killings where the story initially offered by police fell apart when looking at the video evidence. But there are still many, many times that we don’t know the truth. A classic example are some of the accusation of sexual misconduct levied against well-known people -- Brett Kavanaugh, Woody Allen, the rape accusation against Joe Biden last year. The fact is that we don’t know what happened in those instances and so much time has passed, likely that remain mysteries forever. People may think they know. But it’s nothing more than an educated guess. Lesson No. 2: Truth changes with time. Here, I’m not talking about facts as much as accepted truths in terms of societal norms. I was born in 1959. That means I grew up in a world it was taken for granted by many that men were superior to women; homosexuality was deviant behavior; interracial marriage was a radical act; sex before marriage was immoral; if you were an atheist, you kept it to yourself. All those norms have been upended since I was child. As a journalist, I’ve learned its helpful to have that perspective – that the truths we embrace today may not be the truths endorse down the road; that what we see truth evolves over time. Lesson No. 3: Truth reflects an individual’s lived experience. Have any of you seen the movie Rashamon? It’s a 1950 Japanese movie in which various characters provide self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident. As a journalist, it’s something I’ve seen often – people can have wildly different perspectives involving the truth of the matter even when the facts are not in dispute. I’m thinking, for instance, of a story I reported several years ago in which a high school football coach routinely smacked his players in the locker room, like physically hit them enough to hurt. It was not in dispute. A parent heard about it and complained; an internal investigation was done; the coach admitted it, and there was a letter documenting the issue in the coach’s personnel file. But the interpretation of those facts divided the school community. On one side were the parents and players who saw this an abusive coach who should be fired. On the other side – and this was the majority view in that community, btw – were those who thought that the issue was blown out of proportion. That’s a pattern I’ve often encountered when reporting stories. The debate isn’t over the facts, but when what those facts mean, and people have very different reactions based on their own values and their own experiences. I thought about this a lot during the Black Lives Matter unrest last summer. My take on racial injustice is that of an older white woman who tries to do the right thing but has never had to deal with this issue personally. That’s going to be a much different perspective that someone who is Black. As a reporter, one of the most important aspects of my job is to try to gain insight into a range of perspectives, from Trump voters to people of color to people of a different generation or different parts of the state – really listen to what they have to say and think about their truths. Lesson no. 4: Some things are beyond truth. Yet another lesson I’ve had to learn over the years is that some things are simply beyond the question of true or false. The best example here is religion. I grew up Catholic. I have parents who are deeply faithful Catholics – the kind of Catholics who go to daily mass and say the rosary. They would tell you that one of the central truths they hold dear is that Catholicism really is the one true faith. I’m many devoutly religious people feel that way, and not just Catholics, but also evangelical Christians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons. orthodox Jews. Muslims, There are many people who feel their religious path is the only path, but – obviously – they can’t all be right. On the other hand, I can’t say they’re wrong either. Rather, this is about individual truths, and sometimes those are the most important kind. Lesson No. 5: The search for truth requires an open mind. One of the most important skills that I’ve had to learn as a journalist is approaching things with an open mind and a healthy dose of skepticism. There’s an old saying among journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The goal, always, is to verify the facts and get at the truth as much as possible, and sometimes that truth is much more complicated or nuanced or different than I expected. But no question, keeping that open mind can be really, really hard. Confirmation bias is a huge issue for all of us, including journalists. A cautionary tale for all journalists – and all people, really – was the case of a now-infamous Rolling Stone story published in 2014 detailing the story of a University of Virginia student who said she was gang-raped at by seven people at fraternity party. The woman’s story was horrifying. She also totally made it up out of whole cloth, but somehow convinced an award-winning journalist and the editors at Rolling Stone that it was true. So campus rape is a real thing. But in trying to illustrate that point, the reporter, Sabrina Erdeley, had a huge blind spot – she bought too hard into the idea that all alleged victims should be believed, and she failed to do some basic fact-checking to verify the woman’s story. It cost Ederley her journalism career and results in millions of dollars of libel lawsuit judgements against Ederley and Rolling Stone. The takeaway from the Rolling Stone story controversy is the importance of being aware of your inner bias and not taking anything at face value. Lesson No. 6: Truth can hurt. And part of the risk of approaching things with an open mind is discovering unpleasant truths. A person you admire is accused of wrongdoing or is caught in a lie. A policy you thought was a good idea turns out to be a dismal failure. New information is made public that casts a controversy in a totally new light. One of the most difficult stories that I ever covered was the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at Michigan State University. You may remember that Nassar was a sports-medicine doctor who sexually abused hundreds of young female patients over a 25-year period. He got away with it for that long because the abuse involved digital penetration that he told the women was a very specialized treatment for sports-related injuries. When it comes to truth there were two different groups of victims in that case. The first involved women who almost immediately recognized or suspected that this was abuse, although those who complained were ignored. Those women felt vindicated, even validated, by Nassar’s arrest. But there also were patients who totally bought into the idea that this was a legit medical procedure and spent years as a Nassar patient undergoing this “treatment.” They were emotionally crushed by this – somebody they liked and trusted and admired turned out to be their sexual abuser, and the women had allowed this to happen. As one woman said to me, it brought her whole sense of judgment into question. If this turned out to be so different than what she thought was happening all these years, what else was she wrong about? It really showed me how learning the truth isn’t always liberating.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Joan Didion and the New Journalism
    California State University, San Bernardino CSUSB ScholarWorks Theses Digitization Project John M. Pfau Library 1986 Joan Didion and the new journalism Jean Gillingwators Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gillingwators, Jean, "Joan Didion and the new journalism" (1986). Theses Digitization Project. 417. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/417 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the John M. Pfau Library at CSUSB ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses Digitization Project by an authorized administrator of CSUSB ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. JOAN DIDION AND THE NEW JOURNALISM A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, San Bernardino In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English Composition by Jean Gillingwators June 1986 JOAN DIDION AND THE NEW JOURNALISM ■ ■ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, San Bernardino by Jean ^i^ingwators June 1986 Approved by: Jw IT m Chair Date Abstract Most texts designed to teach writing include primarily non-fiction models. Most teachers, though, have been trained in the belles lettres tradition, and their competence usually lies with fiction Or poetry. Cultural preference has traditionally held that fiction is the most important form of literature. Analyzing a selection of twentieth century non-fiction prose is difficult; there are too few resources, and conventional analytical methods too often do not fit modern non-fiction. The new journalism, a recent literary genre, is especially difficult to "teach" because it blends fictive and journalistic techniques.
    [Show full text]
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion
    Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion This collection captures the unique time and place of Didion's focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California, the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.. Why you'll like it: 1960s California, a motley crew, mainstream- and counter-culture. About the Author: Born in Sacramento, California, on December 5, 1934, Joan Didion received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956. She wrote for Vogue from 1956 to 1963, and was visiting regent's lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. Didion also published novels, short stories, social commentary, and essays. Her work often comments on social disorder. Didion wrote for years on her native California; from there her perspective broadened and turned to the countries of Central America and Southeast Asia. Her novels include Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Well known nonfiction titles include Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). In 1971 Joan Didion was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction for Play It As It Lays. In 1981 she received the American Book Award in nonfiction, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Prize in nonfiction for The White Album. Didion has received a great deal of recognition for The Year of Magical Thinking, which was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
    [Show full text]
  • Horizontal and Vertical Themes in Joan Didion's Memoir Where I Was From
    RSA 15-16 (2004-2005) CRISTINA SCATAMACCHIA Horizontal and Vertical Themes in Joan Didion's Memoir Where I Was From 1. According to Katherine Usher Henderson, "Few American writers are 'American' in all the ways that Joan Didion is" (140). Didion, a celebrat­ ed journalist and fiction writer, has published five novels and several col­ lections of essays, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), highly influential and groundbreaking examples of new journalism investigating themes like social fragmentation and rootless­ ness, to the more recent PoliticalFictions (2001) on the workings of Amer­ ican electoral politics, and Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003), a dis­ section of the Bush administration's tactics and strategies for determin­ ing the public perception of the terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq that followed. While writing on so many different subjects, she has always analyzed and interpreted them from a highly personal viewpoint and a specific Western ideological perspective. Didion, in fact, was born in Sacramento in 1934 into an upper-middle class family and her work reflects her experience as an American and a Californian. Her identity as a daughter of California has caused many of her essays to be both region­ al and autobiographical in focus (Winchell 94; Muggli 402; Roiphe 1-2). The mythology of her native state figures prominently in them, as she seeks to render the moral complexity of the American Western experi­ ence, its dilemmas and ambiguities. Even when she deals with larger social and economic forces at work in contemporary American politics, she understands them in terms of her own peculiarly Californian sensi­ bility (Davidson 36; Didion, "Thinking" 10).
    [Show full text]
  • “'The Paranoia Was Fulfilled' – an Analysis of Joan Didion's
    “‘THE PARANOIA WAS FULFILLED’ – AN ANALYSIS OF JOAN DIDION’S ESSAY ‘THE WHITE ALBUM’” Rachele Colombo Independent Scholar ABSTRACT This article looks at Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” from the collection of essays The White Album (1979), as a relevant text to reflect upon America’s turmoil in the sixties, and investigate in particular the subject of paranoia. “The White Album” represents numerous historical events from the 1960s, but the central role is played by the Manson Murders case, which the author considers it to be the sixties’ watershed. This event–along with many others–shaped Didion’s perception of that period, fueling a paranoid tendency that reflected in her writing. Didion appears to be in search of a connection between her growing anxiety and these violent events throughout the whole essay, in an attempt to understand the origin of her paranoia. Indeed, “The White Album” deals with a period in Didion’s life characterized by deep nervousness, caused mainly by her increasing inability to make sense of the events surrounding her, the Manson Murders being the most inexplicable one. Conse- quently, Didion seems to ask whether her anxiety and paranoia are justified by the numerous violent events taking place in the US during the sixties, or if she is giving a paranoid interpretation of com- pletely neutral and common events. Because of her inability to find actual connections between the events surrounding her, in particular political assassinations, Didion realizes she feels she is no longer able to fulfill her main duty as a writer: to tell a story.
    [Show full text]
  • Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Joan Didion Holy Water JOAN DIDION Is a Fifth-Generation Californian, Born I
    Untitled Document Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Joan Didion Holy Water JOAN DIDION is a fifth-generation Californian, born in Sacramento (1934), who took her B.A. at Berkeley and lives in Los Angeles. Between college and marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne, she lived in New York for seven years, where she worked as an editor for Vogue and wrote essays for the National Review and the Saturday Evening Post. In California, Didion and Dunne separately write novels and magazine articles and collaborate on screenplays. Didion's novels are Run River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), and Democracy (1984). Her collections of essays are Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), from which we have taken this selection, and After Henry (1992). She published Salvador in 1983, in 1987 Miami. Joan Didion is one of our best nonfiction writers. She describes the alien, simple California she grew up in and the southern California where she now lives - a landscape of drive-ins and orange groves, ocean and freeway, the Manson murders and ordinary, domestic, adulterous homicide. She has done witness to the turmoils of the decades, especially the sixties - drugs, Vietnam, and personal breakdown. Expertly sensitive and inventive with language, she is most talented in the representation of hysteria. While her book about El Salvador mentions politics, it is essentially the record of a sensibility, sensitive to fear, exposed to an atmosphere that engenders it: "Terror is the given of the place." Much of Didion's journalism derives from interviews.
    [Show full text]
  • Seana Mckenna to Star in Canadian Premiere of Joan Didion’S the Year of Magical Thinking
    NEWS RELEASE Monday, October 19, 2009 For immediate release SEANA MCKENNA TO STAR IN CANADIAN PREMIERE OF JOAN DIDION’S THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING "Remarkable. It will break your heart." The New York Times October 19, 2009 - Seana McKenna, one of this country’s finest actors, will star in the Canadian premiere of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the Belfry Theatre from November 10 to December 13, 2009. Directed by Belfry Artistic Director Michael Shamata, The Year of Magical Thinking is based on Didion’s best selling memoir of the same name. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion, one of America’s great essayists and novelists, captures the compassion, humour and bewilderment of a fiercely intelligent woman whose world lurches suddenly from the ordinary to the unimaginable. This is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . about marriage and children and memory . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” Told with raw candour and a storyteller’s gift for the absurd, this magnificently written meditation on grief – ‘a place none of us know until we reach it’ – is also a celebration of family, filled with a luminous belief in the power of the human spirit to overcome heartbreak and to endure. Joan Didion Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, an aspiring novelist who was writing for Time magazine. The couple moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying six months and ended up making their home there for the next 20 years.
    [Show full text]
  • Journalists Describe the Haight-Ashbury Scene
    Handout 1 - Journalists Describe the Haight-Ashbury Scene Activity Instructions: 1. Give each person in the group a single page from the handout to read. 2. After reading the handout, each person should address the follow- ing questions on a scratch piece of paper: • Whose account of the Haight-Ashbury scene did you read? What is the authors background? • How does the author describe the hippies of Haight-Ashbury? According to the writer, who were the hippies and what did they value? • Do you find it the author’s account complimentary towards the hippies, or critical? What evidence can you provide that leads you to this conclusion? • According to the writer, what was the cause of the Hippie phe- nomenon? 3. Reform as a group, and debate the following question, using the ac- count you read to support your case: Were the young people who moved to Haight Ashbury in 1966-1968 interested in making life in America better, or was their goal to remove themselves from American society? Do you think that their efforts were successful? Handout 1 - Journalists Describe the Haight-Ashbury Scene Ralph J. Gleason, “The Flower Children” (Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, 1968) Ralph J. Gleason was an eminent music and cultural critic, perhaps most famously known for co-founding Rolling Stone magazine. Gleason began his career in journalism at Columbia University, as the editor of the students newspaper The Spectator. He then went on to co-found the first Jazz magazine in America, Jazz Spectator. After serving in World War II, Gleason moved to San Francisco and became a syndicated music and culture writer with The San Francisco Chronicle, where he documented the Jazz and later Hippie scene in the city.
    [Show full text]
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
    Thank you for downloading this Scriptor Press title! Please visit Scriptor Press online for more great literary titles and other media. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion edited by Raymond Soulard, Jr. & Kassandra Soulard Number Sixty-one Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1967) by Joan Didion Burning Man Books is an imprint of This volume is offered, with love, Scriptor Press to past, present, future, and honorary citizens 2442 NW Market Street-#363 of Black Rock City, Nevada Seattle, Washington 98107 [email protected] http://www.scriptorpress.com This volume was composed in the AGaramond font in PageMaker 7.0 on the Macintosh G4 and MacBook Pro computers he center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports Tof casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
    [Show full text]
  • Joan Didion 'On Keeping a Notebook'
    McQ_Part-I.qxd 24/11/2005 12:19 PM Page 21 Joan Didion On Keeping a Notebook The author of novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays, Joan Didion (b. 1934) began her career in 1956 as a staff writer at Vogue magazine in New York. In 1963 she published her first novel, Run River, and the following year returned to her native California. Didion’s essays have appeared in periodicals ranging from Mademoiselle to the National Review. Her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” can be found in her collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Didion’s other nonfiction publications include The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Fixed Ideas: America since 9.11 (2003), and Where I Was From (2003). Didion has defined a writer as “a person whose most absorbed and passion­ ate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid of.” She has also said that “all writing is an attempt to find out what matters, to find the pattern in disorder, to find the grammar in the shimmer. Actually I don’t know whether you find the grammar in the shimmer or you impose a grammar on the shimmer, but I am quite specific about the grammar — I mean it literally. The scene that you see in your mind finds its own structure; the structure dictates the arrangement of the words.
    [Show full text]
  • Joan Didion and the American Dream Joel Alden Schlosser [email protected]
    Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship Political Science 2018 Joan Didion and the American Dream Joel Alden Schlosser [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs Part of the Political Science Commons Custom Citation Schlosser, Joel. 2018. "Joan Didion and the American Dream." Raritan 37.4: 28-51. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs/38 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Joan Didion and the American Dream JOEL ALDEN SCHLOSSER “Dreamers,” declares Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, believe the lie of the American dream, deifying democracy to avoid the human costs it has entailed. “Historians conjured the Dream,” Coates writes. “Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories.” As Jedediah Purdy writes, dreamers are “blinkered people who imagine America an easy and untroubled home. .Dreamers decorate their history with bunting and streamers.” For Coates, these dreamers do not just exhibit bad faith; the disavowal of their complicity in structures of terror against black bodies effectively supports these structures, continuing the lega- cies of racism in the United States. Dreamers implicitly support a poli- tics of racial exclusion and unjustifiable violence. “It is the innocence,” as James Baldwin declared, “that constitutes the crime.” Coates’s recent invocation of the American dream as a destruc- tive and evasive fantasy has a strange affinity with a writer who rarely touched the “race beat”: Joan Didion.
    [Show full text]
  • Place and Persona in the Essays of Joan Didion And
    CALIFORNIA DREAMING: PLACE AND PERSONA IN THE ESSAYS OF JOAN DIDION AND EVE BABITZ Claire Elizabeth Christoff Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of English, Indiana University December 2019 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master’s Thesis Committee ______________________________ Robert Rebein, MFA, PhD, Chair ______________________________ Karen Kovacik, PhD ______________________________ Kyle Minor, MFA ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Firstly, thank you to Dr. Robert Rebein, without whom this project would not have been possible. I am grateful not just for your time, patience, and thoughtful honesty, but for teaching me, way back in the fall of 2015, about the boundless possibilities of creative nonfiction. Thanks to Dr. Karen Kovacik for the invaluable guidance, patience, editorial help, and psychic hand-holding—I will forever want to be you when I grow up. Last but not least, thanks to Kyle Minor for all the advice and all the crazy ideas. I am totally indebted to each of you for your mentorship and support over the years. Thank you also to Dan Wakefield for the stories, the pep talks, so many cups of coffee, and the idea for the title of this thesis. iii Claire Elizabeth Christoff CALIFORNIA DREAMING: PLACE AND PERSONA IN THE ESSAYS OF JOAN DIDION AND EVE BABITZ Joan Didion, a native of Sacramento, California, is the author of many acclaimed collections of journalism and memoir, the first of which were Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979).
    [Show full text]
  • Joan Didion's Miami
    9 The Underwater Narrative: Joan Didion’s Miami Christopher P. Wilson Boston College, U.S.A. This essay examines Joan Didion’s Miami in light of its off-stage or “underwater” narrative concerning the Iran-Contra affair and the distortions in contemporary political rhetoric that scandal epitomized. few years ago, while teaching a course on contemporary narrative A journalism, I took what was for me the rare step of designing a visual aid that went beyond the usual handout, graphic map, or PowerPoint. I took two standard, 8.5" X 11", head-and-shoulder Presidential photographs—one of Ronald Reagan, the other of John F. Kennedy—and glued them together, back-to-back; then I jammed a thin wooden dowel between them, so that I could spin the dowel in my palms, thereby allowing each portrait to morph into the other. In part, I hoped to provoke students into thinking about the way we often approach a work of reportage by gauging our distance from, or identification with, a fixed point on a political spectrum, or the political personage said to embody that position. But as a result, I meant to suggest, we are also flummoxed when we encounter a journalist who sees no funda- mental difference between the supposed ends of that spectrum: no difference, say, between the policies of a Reagan or a Kennedy when it came to Latin America. The intended effect of my device was therefore to spin our ideologi- cal compass, and make the solid suddenly seem fluid. Frankly, I can’t honestly say whether my visual device cleared up existing confusion in the class or just added to it.
    [Show full text]